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January 29, 2004

Mac Punditry

Updates to PowerMac G5: We'll see these soon - it's no secret they're coming. But Apple will wait until at least next week, if not later, rather than overlap with the big Pepsi/Apple iTunes promotion that'll be officially announced in SuperBowl ads.

Old Politics: Steve Jobs was one of Apple's original founders. Steve hired John Sculley as Apple CEO - he recruited Sculley from Pepsi, with the now-famous line, "Do you want to sell sugar water all your life?" Sculley later ousted Jobs in a corporate coup. Jobs went on to found Pixar and NeXT. NeXt was bought by Apple in the late 90s, and Jobs returned. So am I the only one to find a Pepsi/Apple joint contest ironic, especially with Jobs at the helm of Apple?

Changing Names: Apple had been using the URL AppleMusic.com to pimp their iTunes Music Store. But they ran afoul of old agreements with the Beatles' Apple label, which allowed Apple Computer to keep the Apple name under certain music-related provisions. Qithout fanfare, the AppleMusic.com URL seems to have vanished from advertising, replaced with iTunes.com.

Posted by jim at 11:28 AM | Comments (0)

January 28, 2004

Roll Over, Rover

Was having various and sundry data errors with my MovableType install on niherlas.com, which were finally attributable to database corruption. Given that I was using BerkeleyDB when I set it up, but now that Pair gives my account level access to MySQL, I just exported the entries, saved the customized templates, and nuked the site from orbit.

Then re-installed 2.661 using MySQL. Restored the four users (me, jenni, stella, and The Boy), the blogs (mine, Nathan's, Stella's), the templates, and re-imported all the entries. All should be good again, save for the repeated spamming of the poor folks reading this blog in their LJ friendslist. Whew.

I'm getting pretty damn good at this shit.

Posted by jim at 04:43 PM | Comments (0)

January 22, 2004

The Internet giveth, and the Internet mocketh...

Democratic Presidential hopeful Howard Dean's raucous speech after his disappointing 3rd place finish in the Iowa Caucuses had just that right combination of fervor, mania, and strained vocal chords that makes samplers and music mixers rub their hands in glee.

With the recent (last week!) release of Apple's new music program, Garage Band, making music from loops and samples is more accessible to beginners than it ever was.

Like they say in the sitcom promos - "hilarity ensues!"

Posted by jim at 09:52 AM | Comments (0)

January 14, 2004

Random Networking

Anil Dash (via BoingBoing), makes an interesting observation that almost all the "enabling technologies" that have come about recently are "tied to individuals. From email to mobile phones to IM to social networking applications, a single person is the most frequent point of contact."

There are a couple of secondary items that come from Anil's observations. How many times have you found yourself lost in phone-tree hell, where an automated phone system that might be useful if you knew exactly who you wanted to talk to gives you the run-around as you try to find the equivalent of a general receptionist to help you find out who can actually help you? Same thing. Ever find yourself wanting to get "into" an social group, only to discover that you can't without an e-invite of some sort? How to get it? Know an individual "inside". How do you do that? Get inside. Huh?

A book I read in 1990 (4 years before the explosion of the Web, back when we were using Macs and Windows 3.0), posited a near-future World Data Net where the challenge wasn't finding information, it was the two-fold challenge of finding the information you wanted and filtering through the barrage of information you didn't need. Design of custom retrieval (for "pull" data) and filtration (for "push" data) software was an industry in itself. One of the main characters, in an effort to prevent what she described as the all-too-common self-selection of the world (filter out everything but agreeable news and opinions), hired a wily convicted hacker to write her filters such that there was always an element of randomness - something that, while possibly of interest to the reader, was outside the purvey of defined filters and search criteria.

It was only a couple pages in the book, but it made an impression on me then, and continues to be relevant today. The one-to-one technology that we're surrounding ourself with is slowly weeding out the random, unplanned encounters of our lives. That may include the spammers, and the annoying guy down the hall - but it also includes the person who might have that out-of-print book we were looking for, or the really interesting person that lives just down the street.

Noted Columnist William Raspberry wrote an opinion piece recently about the importance of community, quoting one researcher who concludes that "it is the [lack of] quality of [...] interpersonal relationships and [...] transactions with the wider social and material environment that lead to behavioral, emotional and physical health problems."

This is going on a bit longer than I intended, but the point seems to be the following: most of the new tools and technologies that we are introducing are, as Anil says, targeted towards individual interactions. Additionally, they enable heavy filtering so as to only show us what we want to see. On the other side, social structures - and individuals within them - are being damaged by the increasing lack of meaningful broad social interactions.

Are we doing this to ourselves? Is the new "enabling" technology not only limiting the breadth of our interactions with others, but actually starting to damage our social insitutions? Can't say for sure, but something doesn't feel quite right these days...

Posted by jim at 09:40 AM | Comments (0)

January 07, 2004

MacWorld Recap

Might as well get some Mac geekery out of the way.

MacWorld SF is going on this week, and Steve Jobs took the stage yesterday to give the expo keynote and introduce the usual bevy of new products. I'm going to try to be somewhat concise here...

iPod mini: This really should have been $199, and I'll wager it'll see that price point by Q3 2004. With only $50 difference between the 4GB iPod mini and the "low-end" 15GB iPod, the smaller size just doesn't seem worth it to me.

GarageBand/iLife '04: GarageBand is a damn cool music tool (mixing, looping, recording, you name it) - and Apple's going to have a lot of aspiring musicians (as well as coffeshop performers and regional bands) buy Macs just to use GB. That it's included free with all new Macs, and only $50 (as part of the iLife bundle) for existing Macs is sweet - maybe the iPod mini's high price is subsidizing GarageBand. The iLife upgrade looks strong, with performance and/or feature improvements on all the apps. iPhoto is no longer a free standalone download, but Apple was about to do this last year with the original introduction of iLife (and backed down at the last moment). Not unexpected, and the low price of iLife (heck, it's $29 edu!) is easy to swallow.

Xserve G5/ Xserve RAID: Boy, this really makes the 1st generation Xserve G4 here at the office look like a noisy pile. The RAID continues to impress, and I think Apple will start selling a lot of these to non-Mac shops.

Xgrid: very understated - but this will do amazing things for academic/research computing when it matures and leaves beta. An ad-hoc, self-managing clustering system that uses spare CPU cycles of local Macs? Come on - suddenly those computing labs, which can sit empty for hours at a time, turn into compute clusters. Apple needs to pimp this to higher-ed, and hard.

We'll probably see updates and speed-bumps to the Macs in the next couple months. There's been an eMac revision in the rumor mill for a while, and the Xserve uses updated G5 procs that should see light in a faster G5 desktop real soon now. Me, I just need to take care of a few financial things (such as a first pass at 2003 taxes), then I'm going to trade in that G4 desktop for a 15" Powerbook...

Posted by jim at 10:00 AM | Comments (0)